PROJECT SUMMARY Congenital limb malformations, caused by abnormal limb development, occur in one in 1,000 live human births. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms of limb development is relevant to biology and medicine. Limb development starts with the specification of a discrete region of the lateral plate mesoderm into limb progenitors, which gives rise to the limb bud. In the last several decades, the research field intensely focused on understanding the mechanisms by which signaling centers in limb buds regulate patterning of limb buds, leading to formation of limb skeletons. However, we have limited knowledge about how limb progenitors are specified and what mechanisms regulate their initial differentiation before the establishment of limb bud signaling centers; yet, these processes are essential for correct limb development. Studies in the last decades showed that distinct mechanisms operate on lateral plate mesoderm and limb progenitors prior to establishing limb bud signaling centers. For example, we found that deletion of Sall4, encoding a zinc finger transcription factor, approximately two days before the onset of limb development, resulted in severe defects specifically in hindlimbs, while deletion at later stages had no or subtle effect. In our preliminary studies, we found that simultaneous inactivation of Sall4, Irx3 and Irx5 (Irx3/5) caused the absence of hindlimbs with the loss of expression of hindlimb progenitor-specific genes, such as Isl1. This result indicates that combined function of Sall4 and Irx3/5 specifies lateral plate mesoderm into hindlimb progenitors. In Aim 1, our goal is to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of hindlimb progenitor specification. We will determine whether SALL4 and IRX3/5 redundantly and directly regulate Isl1 through its enhancer. We will determine genes that act downstream of Sall4 and Irx3/5 to specify hindlimb progenitors by genomic experiments. We will determine their functions in specifying hindlimb progenitors by genetic knockout approaches. We also obtained data, strongly suggesting that Sall4 knockout causes increased glycolysis in limb progenitors, when endogenous glycolysis is transitioning from high to low activity. Recent studies provided evidence that, beyond supplying energy, glycolysis mediates fibroblast growth factor signaling in the tail bud and regulates body elongation. Fibroblast growth factor signaling is one of earliest signaling that regulates limb progenitor differentiation. In Aim 2, we will test an intriguing hypothesis that Sall4-dependent repression of glycolysis regulates differentiation of limb progenitors. We will construct metabolomes of wild type and Sall4 mutant limb progenitors to understand metabolic status and the changes by loss of Sall4. We will test the role of glycolysis by reducing glycolysis in Sall4 mutant embryos and determine their differentiation, as well as increasing glycolysis in embryos without mutations. This proposal will generate important basic information on the specification and differentiation of limb progenitors, which are fundamental initial processes of limb development.